


Snow

by SilverDagger



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Drabble, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 11:17:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gaila spends the first two decades of her life without seeing snow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snow

Gaila spends the first two decades of her life without seeing snow. The Syndicate-owned pleasure station where she grows up has constant atmosphere, light, temperature and pressure, all things controlled and in their place. She knows of seasons the same way she knows of stars, distant and named in books she is forbidden to touch, and when she escapes, variable weather is newer, stranger to her than freedom. Freedom she had dreamed of, after all, touched and tasted it in her mind a thousand times over. Winter, she has never considered.

Her first year in Starfleet, she learns the nature of ice and snow, bare branches, sere brown hills. She learns how the world can change overnight from revealed to concealed, and she dons winter clothes like armor, layer after layer to keep out the cold.

Now, she learns how the world changes again. She watches the slow thaw, the tentative unfurling of new roots and leaves, a landscape reawakening to warmth. She sits beside her roommate Nyota outside the dorms, on evenings when light stays longer than it had the day before. They talk in all the languages of Gaila's childhood, and they study, and sometimes they argue about things that never matter much. And that is all. No leering entitlement in her actions or her eyes, no heat without light. 

Nyota's smile is the brilliance of sun on snow, and Gaila learns friendship on equal terms. And another possibility opens for her gradually, gentle and unexpected, entirely new.


End file.
